It’s unusual to see a government that is on the face of it so entrenched in power — a solid 62% of the national vote after two decades in office, eight out of nine provincial assemblies — in such disarray. Yet President Jacob Zuma’s African National Congress administration limps from disaster to disaster, full of…

Politicians and officialdom are not known for their grasp of nuance. This makes for inadvertently amusing acronyms to give us the occasional giggle. We have had such gems as Boss, the apartheid era’s Bureau of State Security, Saps, the hapless police force that shot dead 34 at Marikana, and Wasps, the Worker and Socialist Party,…